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Spectral Cinema from a Phantom State: Film Aesthetics and the Politics of Identity in Divided Heaven and Solo Sunny

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Spectral Cinema from a Phantom State: Film Aesthetics and the Politics of Identity in Divided Heaven and Solo Sunny View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sussex Research Online Spectral cinema from a phantom state: film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Divided Heaven and Solo Sunny Article (Accepted Version) Austin, Thomas (2016) Spectral cinema from a phantom state: film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Divided Heaven and Solo Sunny. Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 7 (3). pp. 274- 286. ISSN 2040-350X This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/61760/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse: Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University. Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Spectral cinema from a phantom state: film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Divided Heaven and Solo Sunny Thomas Austin * * [email protected] School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RQ, UK In this essay I draw on close textual analysis to consider the interface between film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel / Divided Heaven (1964) and Solo Sunny (1979). Both films focus on women who have to confront painful processes of self realisa- tion in specifically East German contexts. They also show Wolf and his collaborators working in two very different modes, from a nouvelle vague-inspired mix of location shooting and self- conscious formal artifice to a more laconic style and mobile camera that borrow from documentary aesthetics. Viewed from the perspective of today, the films resist the reductive stereotyping of what Christa Wolf in 1991 called the 'phantom' East Germany, and offer a more productive haunting. As living ghosts in the post-reunification era, they are a reminder of the necessity of remembering, and so confound both a negative 'master narrative' of the GDR and a collective amnesia with no interest in this history. Keywords Konrad Wolf; DEFA; East Germany; film aesthetics; politics of identity When viewed in retrospect, any lived experience has the potential to become a ghostly revenant, shaped and coloured by the contingencies of memory re/created in the now. Due to its capability to capture moments in time for an audience, film is particularly susceptible to a nostalgic or melancho- lic backward gaze (see Mulvey 2006). In Bazin’s famous formulation, cinema’s photographic grounding instantiates humanity’s 'mummy complex', a preservative obsession seeking 'a defense against the passage of time' (Bazin 1967, 2005, 9).i But if this is true of cinema in general, some cinemas, and some films, might prove to be more spectral than others. East German cinema is cer- tainly a candidate for this category. As a failed socialist utopia, a phantom state no longer on the map, it is tempting to approach the GDR under the heading of 'if only'.ii Larson Powell notes that 'In the case of DEFA film, the inherent spectrality of the filmic medium is […] doubled by that of GDR society itself, which was always conceived of as a nation ‘in transition’ toward an eventual higher state it was never to reach' (Powell 2014, 185). As Barton Byg has suggested, there is a risk that East German cinema becomes the mythologised site of a 'romanticized "otherness’”, both with- in Germany and beyond: 'The GDR is more evocative in film now that it does not exist' (Byg 2013, 76,78). But this hazard should not preclude critical engagement with what Anke Pinkert has termed 'an alternative cultural archive that [ought to be recognized as] part of, rather than excluded from Germany’s postwar transformations' (Pinkert 2008, 205). In the midst of the Cold War the novelist Christa Wolf ruefully recalled her youthful optimism in a young country: 'those glorious rambling nocturnal discussions about the paradise on whose doorstep we were sure we stood, hungry and wearing our wooden shoes. [..] Make a wry face if you like, but all the same, one must, once in a lifetime, when the time was right, have believed in the impossible' (Wolf 1968, 51-52). Three mon- ths after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a speech both melancholic and prescient, Wolf asked: 'what will become of East Germany's forty years of history? [...] when it is gone it will leave a phantom pain [of] grief, shame, and remorse'.iii Now, nearly 30 years after die Wende, the cinema of East Germany, haunted by the ghosts of hope and loss, continues to demand analysis.iv In this essay I consider two films by Konrad Wolf, the most powerful and successful director in the GDR. (Wolf was president of the GDR Academy of the Arts from 1965 until his death in 1982. His 1 older brother Markus was head of GDR espionage, the General Reconnaissance Administration, from 1953 to 1986.) Scholarship has tended to concentrate on Wolf’s formally innovative autobio- graphical account of fighting with the Red Army in the liberation of Germany, Ich war neunzehn / I Was Ninenteen (1968).v I focus instead on the representation of the travails of the heroines in Der geteilte Himmel / Divided Heaven (1964) and Solo Sunny (1979), both of whom have to confront painful processes of self realisation in specifically East German contexts. The two films combine generic templates (romance and breakup, the struggle to 'make it' as a performer) with indirect commentary on everyday life under the communist regime. The stories of Rita in Divided Heaven and Ingrid/ Sunny in Solo Sunny can be considered Gengenwartsfilme insofar as they are 'social dramas' 'set in the present day of the contemporary GDR' (Rinke 2006, 4). But they both also evince an abiding interest in the plasticity of film form. These films, one made shortly before the notorious eleventh plenum of the Central Committee of the SED / Socialist Unity Party in 1965 and the other more than a decade after, manifest significant shifts in content, particularly attitudes towards state ideology that validated the collective over the individual.vi They also show Wolf and his collabora- tors working in two very different modes, from a nouvelle vague-inspired mix of location shooting and self-conscious formal artifice to a more laconic style and mobile camera that borrow from do- cumentary aesthetics.vii Divided Heaven: space, staging and social relations Divided Heaven is an adaptation of Christa Wolf's novel of the same name.viii It plays out in a series of extended flashbacks as the protagonist Rita, a trainee school teacher, recalls the previous two years during her slow recovery from a nervous breakdown, precipitated by the end of her rela- tionship with Manfred, a research chemist who defects to the West. The film’s stylistic 'excesses' draw on the French New Wave and in some ways anticipate those of the New German Cinema on the other side of the border.ix A key influence is Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’ investigation of memory, relationships and history in Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). Joshua Feinstein notes that 'Wolf himself acknowledged similarities between the two films [including] elliptical editing tech- niques pioneered by Resnais' (Feinstein 2002, 118). As Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel sug- gest, Divided Heaven is 'stylistically, as well as thematically close to the international art cinema [...] [and] situates itself somewhere between Marguerite Duras’ films with Alain Resnais, or the ear- ly Antonioni films with Monica Vitti' (Elsaesser and Wedel 2001, 17-18). Wolf, his director of photography Werner Bergmann and editor Helga Krause cram a battery of foregrounded techniques into the first four minutes of the film. The opening sequence, which estab- lishes the urban milieu of Halle while a female voiceover talks about summer coming to an end in phrases taken from the source novel, includes extreme high angles, canted framing, and an extended 12-second shot of two lines of poplars. The trees extend from the bottom to the top of the frame on either side of the camera, and recede into the distance to create two diagonal blocks of shimmering leaves, while the paler sky between them comprises a distinct V shape. The next shot offers a subtle graphic (mis)match: an extreme low angle of a smoking factory chimney, an inverted V in the cen- tre of the frame, reverses the previous composition. As the camera tracks left, the chimney slides to screen right, and the line of white smoke shifts from a horizontal line to a diagonal, stretching from top right to bottom left of the screen, while the title appears at screen left. Wolf uses canted framing again when the scene shifts to Rita’s collapse at the train factory where she works,x and then repeat- edly deploys a split screen as, during her slow recovery, she recalls the beginnings of her relation- ship with Manfred.
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